Plasmashell memory usage

[bendy]

According to top, the plasmashell process is using nearly 8 GB of memory in my 17.10. Is that normal?

[chimak111]

Post the output of

top -bn1 | head -30

[dequire]

Mine uses less than 1 so...no. Something is wrong somewhere. What process(es) does system monitor show are using all your RAM?

[rbetzen]

Would like to second this. Apparent memory leak with plasmashell on my system. Memory usage climbs and eventually uses up all nearly 40GB, yes 40 of my ram plus all 35 GB of swap. Programs get killed and finally plasmashell gets killed. Not sure what's triggering it yet.

[bendy]

Post the output of

top -bn1 | head -30

nick@nick-desktop:~$ top -bn1 | head -30
top - 09:33:18 up  1:27,  2 users,  load average: 0.24, 0.13, 0.08
Tasks: 249 total,   1 running, 248 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  1.3 us,  0.8 sy,  0.1 ni, 97.8 id,  0.1 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem : 16325284 total,  7597812 free,  6370144 used,  2357328 buff/cache
KiB Swap:  3906044 total,  3906044 free,        0 used. 9774092 avail Mem 

 PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
1495 nick      20   0 8453284 4.269g 151732 S  37.5 27.4   4:13.54 plasmashell
3543 nick      20   0   46376   4008   3352 R  18.8  0.0   0:00.03 top
1013 root      20   0  317448  98516  59536 S   6.2  0.6   1:21.48 Xorg
1040 root     -51   0       0      0      0 S   6.2  0.0   0:55.10 irq/62-nvidia
1485 nick      20   0 3262068 106212  82200 S   6.2  0.7   1:47.05 kwin_x11
3516 nick      20   0  744820  72168  57464 S   6.2  0.4   0:01.29 ksysguard
   1 root      20   0  220192   8444   6296 S   0.0  0.1   0:01.27 systemd
   2 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd
   4 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kworker/0:0H
   6 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 mm_percpu_wq
   7 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.02 ksoftirqd/0
   8 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.60 rcu_sched
   9 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 rcu_bh
  10 root      rt   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/0
  11 root      rt   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.01 watchdog/0
  12 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 cpuhp/0
  13 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 cpuhp/1
  14 root      rt   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.01 watchdog/1
  15 root      rt   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.01 migration/1
  16 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/1
  18 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kworker/1:0H
  19 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 cpuhp/2
  20 root      rt   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.01 watchdog/2

[bendy]

I don't know if it's relevant, but my laptop isn't afflicted with the same problem. The main difference I can see is that my laptop has built-in Intel graphics, whereas my desktop has an nvidia card.

[Snowhog]

According to top, the plasmashell process is using nearly 8 GB of memory in my 17.10. Is that normal?

nick@nick-desktop:~$ top -bn1 | head -30
top - 09:33:18 up  1:27,  2 users,  load average: 0.24, 0.13, 0.08
Tasks: 249 total,   1 running, 248 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  1.3 us,  0.8 sy,  0.1 ni, 97.8 id,  0.1 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem : 16325284 total,  7597812 free,  6370144 used,  2357328 buff/cache
KiB Swap:  3906044 total,  3906044 free,        0 used. 9774092 avail Mem 

 PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
1495 nick      20   0 8453284 4.269g 151732 S  37.5 27.4   4:13.54 plasmashell

In the output above, plasmashell is using 27.4% of installed memory, or 4.384GBs, not ‘nearly 8 GB’.

[bendy]

That output was taken on a different occasion to the original post. It seems to gradually get worse - it's at 5GB right now.

I hope you're not suggesting that only 4.384GBs is OK!

[Snowhog]

I hope you're not suggesting that only 4.384GBs is OK!

No, I'm not.

While not running 17.10 (so can't say here, that 17.10 is at fault), on my 16.04 install (laptop), just after booting and logging in, plasmashell is taking just over 2% of my available 8GB or memory. So it would seem that 'something' isn't right with your installation/configuration.

[chimak111]

I suspect something to do with the choice of graphics. Since I've never had fancy graphics, I can't suggest any specific remedial measures.

OP could install inxi and then provide the output of

inxi -Fxz

for a brief summary of the system.

[bendy]

I may have isolated the problem. I had a slideshow set up as my wallpaper before. I just changed that to a plain colour and the plasmashell memory usage seems to have stabilised at a very reasonable 100 MB. I'll keep on monitoring it...

[chimak111]

I may have isolated the problem. I had a slideshow set up as my wallpaper before. I just changed that to a plain colour and the plasmashell memory usage seems to have stabilised at a very reasonable 100 MB. I'll keep on monitoring it...

Great! So you didn't have a slideshow on the laptop?

[oshunluvr]

FYI, I had a widget do this to me too. I deleted it and the problem went away. IIRC, it was the daily comic strip. This was a while back and I'm on a different kernel now, and I haven't tried to put it back on.

[jlittle]

I wonder if that memory usage is "real"¹. An obvious way to implement a slide show is to map the slides' files into memory and just carry on. It'll show as memory in use, but will be at the top of the list when the system wants to claim some "real" memory for whatever purpose.

Having a look at the memory map of an offending process might be interesting. Off the top of my head I can't remember how to do that, but I imagine it's somewhere in /proc², and that gdb would do that.

Regards, John Little
[edit]
1 as opposed to "virtual". I know all the memory used by a process is "virtual", but when it's backed by a file and is not modified, there's no cost to move it out of real memory.
2 Yes, /proc/<process id>/maps is just that. There is also a command called pmap that has a more compact output.

[Rog131]

Bug 385350 - Hudge amount of memory in slideshow background - https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=385350
Bug 382262 - Media frame plasmoid causes plasmashell memory leak - https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=382262

both are marked duplicates of the : Bug 381000 - [Regression] High CPU when background is set to slideshow - https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=381000